About 20 years into the wine renaissance on Sicily’s Mount Etna, could there be anything new?
Yes, as it turns out. On a trip there in the fall, I sipped wines from the latest (I count it as the third) wave.
So what is Etna’s new, new, new wave?
The Etna wine boom began a bit after the turn of the 21st century when an alignment of stars brought a small group of passionate pioneers to the mountain, which they explored in search of great, old volcanic terroirs.
Their Nerello Mascalese–based reds, Carricante whites and other projects took off and caught the attention of world wine lovers. That triggered stage two: a boom of investment by established winemakers from across Sicily, Italy (with the most prominent example being Angelo Gaja) and even California.
Now comes a wave of younger winemakers—particularly Sicilians. They’ve studied the work of previous waves and are cultivating niches of their own.
“Young people from [Etna and across Sicily] are attracted to wine now,” says Benedetto Alessandro, 33, the tall, red-haired and blue-eyed winemaker for his family’s young Etna winery Generazione Alessandro. “For those who don’t emigrate to somewhere else, it’s very, very interesting.”
Notable New Etna Red and Rosé Wines
Alessandro grew up more than 100 miles to the west, near Palermo. At 11, he began making wine with his father and uncles in the family’s fourth-generation winery in western Sicily, Alessandro di Camporeale. After studying enology in Northern Italy, Alessandro took off to work in New World cellars, principally as the enologist for Chile’s Viña Falernia.
Returning to Sicily in 2015, he worked at the family winery and toured the vineyards of the island, including those of Etna. The following year, he convinced his two cousins to buy an abandoned 11-acre hazelnut farm on Etna’s northeastern slopes in Linguaglossa to plant Nerello Mascalese, along with Carricante and Catarratto.
In the meantime, Alessandro began making some acclaimed Etna wines for Tenuta di Fessina and, in 2017, for the debut vintage of Monteleone Etna wines, a project by his wife-to-be—Palermo food-and-wine writer Giulia Monteleone—from her family’s old vines.
What intrigued him the most about Etna was that the wines were complete opposites of the ripe Syrah, Nero d’Avola and Sauvignon Blanc he makes with his family in western Sicily.
“We liked the idea of producing something completely different,” he says. “Even the clientele is different.”
While the more structured wines from the west are favored by Northern Europeans, he says, the sleeker, lighter Etna wines win out in the U.S. and the U.K. “In the U.S. now, the less color there is in reds the better,” he says.
When I visited Alessandro, he had installed a winery in an old ruin of a traditional, rustic, countryside winery in Palmento. Here he makes four wines. His Etna white and red are modern and well-made—crisply fruit-forward and youthful in the glass. His Vignazza rosato is made from a portion of the vineyard where Mascalese doesn’t fully ripen and was inspired by “the idea of rosé Champagne without the bubbles.”
The fourth wine is a single-vineyard red from a rented 70-year-old plot in Contrada Sciaramanica. It’s got more of the brooding depth and quirky spice that I love in great Etna reds.
Late ripening and thin-skinned, Nerello Mascalese is a quirky grape that often changes producers’ ideas about winemaking. I’m eager to see Alessandro’s wines evolve as his vineyards develop maturity.
Notable New Etna White Wines
For white varieties, the Etna producer to watch is Carla Maugeri of Maugeri, who is working with Tuscan-born winemaker Emiliano Falsini to make Carricante from its prime terroirs.
The Maugeri, an historic family from Catania, own vineyards on Etna’s sea-facing eastern slope, around the commune of Milo, in the small Etna Bianco Superiore DOC.
The particularity of Milo is not just its proximity to the Mediterranean and the relatively high rainfall it receives; in addition, a swath of mineral-rich, old alluvial soils lies under the volcanic gravel and sand.
What exactly does that do for white varieties here? I’m no wine geologist, but the wines do show off Carricante’s mix of blade-sharp acidity and mineral texture, along with complexity that grows with age.
Maugeri’s father, Renato, who professionally cultivated citrus trees and worked as a bank executive, made wine here with his siblings to drink or sell in bulk, before abandoning that effort decades ago. Fifty years ago, they bottled one vintage that never sold. Thousands of vintage 1973 bottles lie in a ruin of a stone vineyard shed under layers of dust.
“In 2015, my sisters and I said, ‘Why don’t we restore [the land in Milo] as it was? It’s our patrimony,’” explains Carla, 44, an architect and boutique hotelier.
They meticulously restored about 17 acres of terraced vineyards that follow the contours of the mountainside more than 2,000 feet above the sea. Following traditional practices, the vines are head-trained and farmed organically, requiring a lot of work by hand. This young project, like Alessandro’s, should also improve with experience and time.
Of particular interest from the Maugeri estate is a pair of single-vineyard bottlings that, this year, can be enjoyed side by side for the first time.
Maugeri’s Contrada Volpare “Frontebosco” (which translates to “facing the woods”), produced from the 2020 vintage, is a slightly richer, earthier wine from south-facing vineyards. The Contrado Praino “Frontemare” (“sea-facing”), produced from 2022, is a more ethereal, saline wine from a nearby vineyard that faces east. The latter will make its U.S. debut in early 2024.
The wines are made identically—90 percent aged in French oak tonneaux for eight months on their lees. But they already show very different faces of Etna’s potential. Terroir vs. air-oir?
Maugeri makes four whites and a Nerello-based rosé, but has resisted suggestions that she make Etna Rosso.
“Here is not for reds,” she says of Milo. “I believe to do something well, you have to do it with one focus.”
